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He was the administration's leading hard liner on Iran, North Korea and Red China. I am truly sorry to see him go. Based on what I know of him, he would be adamantly opposed to a secret meeting with the Taliban at Camp David. Could he have leaked the secret meeting leading to it's abortion? That too is out of character.

I think whoever pushed that meeting on the eve of 9/11 should be fired. I realize Trump wants to exit Afghanistan, so did Obama. Both have found it extremely difficult. The bottom line is that we lost the war. The Taliban did not need to be defeated, they needed to be exterminated and I don't think America had the stomach for that.

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The United States Navy, fighting Moslem barbarians since 1801.

All they had to do was outlast us to win, and since it was basically impossible to exterminate them even if we tried, they would ultimately win. They have refuges across the Pak border we can't touch and a sympathetic population there, so we could wipe out every last one of them in Afghanistan, leave, and in ten years they'd be back. The US doesn't have the political will to fight total war or stay in occupation. That's too 'Colonialist' for the people who run DOD or State, so we've been doing shit that doesn't work since Korea.

Bolton himself is so crazy belligerent that his best use is as a foil for playing Mutt-and-Jeff with the foreign leadership, actually following his advice directly is pretty unlikely to produce results anybody wants since it involves writing checks we can't cash aside from the whole 'Bad idea' aspect.

I wouldn't put it entirely past Bolton leak the meeting info myself, he's got just as big an ego as anyone else at that level and is not above bureaucratic reindeer games when he doesn't get his way.

I don't have a lot of confidence that the Afghan government will be able to keep the Taliban out of power once our troops leave. Women will be the ones to suffer most, as the Taliban closes their schools and puts them back in burkas.

As far as Bolton goes, I would like to think that a President listens to people that disagree with him, in order to see the complete picture. I'm not a huge Bolton fan, being a liberal and all, but if I were a liberal President, I'd want some of my advisors to be conservatives.